Mary Shelley: Immortality, Gender and the Rosy Cross

Marie Roberts

{60} Naming the parts of the assembled title, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Shelley, signposts the three major influences playing on her
life and work: namely that unholy trinity of Shelleyan aesthetics, Wollstonecraftian feminism
and Godwinian radicalism,
which produced a daughter of the Enlightenment as ideologically
hybrid and disparate as the very creature pieced together by
Victor Frankenstein. Invoking such an irresistible parallel is
not to comply with Aristotle's equation of the
female with the monstrous, but instead to give resonance to this
amalgam of conflicting elements destined to propagate both the
unexpected and the incongruous. Examples of such contradictions
abound, as in Mary Shelley's creative urge to beget monsters and
conjure up visions of a mad scientist's gargantuan desire to
create life which defied male precepts of feminine propriety.
The public way in which she defines herself through her novels
belies her projected private image of docility and submission,
when we consider such denunciations of the novel as William Beckford's verdict
that Frankenstein (1818) was 'perhaps the foulest
Toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of
the present times' (Gotlieb 61). Likewise her unwillingness to
inculcate the feminist radicalism of her mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft, is offset by her apparent deployment of a
feminist critique of science in Frankenstein. The Gothic Rosicrucian
ingredients of this novel, the legacy of her father, William
Godwin, are, for want of a more appropriate metaphor,
cross-fertilised by the Romanticism of -- among
others -- her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley who, according to
some critics, provided the author with a model for the monster,
even though its hideous appearance is anathema to Romantic
aesthetics. De Quincey draws attention to a family resemblance
between Godwin (to whom the novel was dedicated) and his daughter's
creation by remarking that 'Most people felt of Mr Godwin {61}
. . . the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre
(sic) or the monster created by Frankenstein' (III: 25).
Aside from the obvious familial connections uniting the
discordant elements in Mary Shelley's life and art, a measure of
kinship may be realised by way of a Rosicrucian reading of much
of her fiction. Her acquaintance with the Brotherhood of the
Rosy Cross was probably mediated by Godwin who was to formally
introduce his readers to them finally in his biographical
Lives of the Necromancers, published in 1834 (35-6). Elusive
in the extreme, the
Brethren pose a daunting challenge to the researcher,
reputed as they are to be invisible as well as immortal!
Godwin's fascination with Rosicrucianism led him to father the
Rosicrucian novel, a designation employed first by Edith
Birkhead when identifying him as the first novelist to 'embody
in a romance the ideas of the Rosicrucians' (16). From his
seminal work, St Leon (1799), sprang a curious
literary progeny starting with the Gothic monstrosity St
Irvyne: The Rosicrucian (1810), written this
time by Percy Shelley, who, according to Peacock's caricature in
Nightmare Abbey, had been so taken with the idea of a
Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross that he even began to talk like a
Rosicrucian (Peacock 102). Rosicrucian-inspired fiction
characteristically explores the artistic possibilities presented
by the legendary philosopher's stone and elixir of life which
had been added on to the Renaissance tradition of the Rosy
Cross.1
Protagonists of these novels invariably become disillusioned
with their acquired immortality; for them the elixir
vitae transmutes into the taedium vitae. Cast down
into a vortex of loneliness and guilt, these immortals are
compelled to wander peripatetically in search of spiritual
fulfilment. Chamelion-like, a resurrected Faust or Wandering Jew, the
Rosicrucian hero is a composite of the heretical and the fallen,
seeking out from amongst the arcane repositories of magic and
myth forbidden springs of ancient knowledge, Arcadian fountains
of perpetual youth and archetypal elixirs of eternal life.

Mary Shelley's most overtly Rosicrucian piece is the short story
'The Mortal Immortal' (1833), in which the
hero, Winzy, accidentally drinks the elixir of life, thinking it
to be a cure for his unrequited love. Ironically, his ensuing
revitalisation and rejuvenation not only gain his beloved
Bertha's undying love but also lead to the unexpected
side-effect of eternal life. After having outlived all his
companions, Winzy diagnoses himself as desirous of death, yet
never dying -- a mortal immortal. This is the inescapable
paradigm for the {62} Rosicrucian heroes, who resolutely throw
themselves into the craters of active volcanoes, along the paths
of avalanches, offer themselves as human targets in the front
line of battle and beckon the eye of the hurricane to consume
them. But Winzy, who admits that he is still a relatively young
immortal compared to the eighteen centuries endured by veterans
like the Wandering Jew, is not yet willing to accept defeat and
is still prepared to 'adopt more resolute means, and, by
scattering and annihilating the atoms that compose my frame, set
at liberty the life imprisoned within' (Collected Tales
230). Humorous touches in the tale describe how Bertha, tired of
being mistaken for his mother, eventually persuades Winzy to
wear a grey wig. It is tempting to identify Bertha with the
ageing Mary Shelley, who was continually confronted by a spectre
of Shelley as a timeless vision of perpetual youth and immortal
genius. Addressing the grave as 'that miserable conclave to
which the beings I best loved belong' (Journal 193), she
mourns for herself as the undead, the last human being living
out a solitary existence on a planet littered with the dead. The
dramatisation of this desolation takes place in her third
full-length novel, The Last Man (1826). It opens in the
cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl, where an ancient piece of parchment
has been found recording the anguish of the sole survivor of the
human race, Verney, who so far has been unable to escape his
Todestraum or dream of death.

In Frankenstein, Victor and his monstrous creation form
between them another version of the Rosicrucian hero who has
transcended death via the forbidden pathways of magic and
science. Consuming his way through existence, the Rosicrucian
wanderer parasitically steals a life-span to which he is not
entitled. A metonymy for alienation, the Rosicrucian, who has
been abandoned by death, is left lonely and isolated. In
Frankenstein there is displacement in this respect, since
it is the monster who pays the penalty by proxy for Victor's
pursuit of the philosopher's stone. The dialectic between Victor
and the monster may be understood in terms of Marx's theory of alienation, -- part of which
concerns mankind's alienation from the product of its labour,
seen in the estrangement of the monster from his maker. The
creature has the characteristics of both worker and product,
having been negated and alienated by capitalist society. Franco
Moretti, who regards the monster as a metaphor of the terror of
the worker embodied in bourgeois society, argues that it
incarnates the dialectic of estranged labour described by Marx:
'The more formed the product the more deformed the worker, the
more {63} civilised the product, the more barbaric the
worker.'2 The
grotesque appearance of the monster may also be seen in terms of
this analogy, since alienated labour which generates
productivity for the master, as in Frankenstein's scientific
achievement, results in deformity for the worker. The potential
of the monster as a catalyst for revolution is the quality most
noticeably identifiable with Percy Shelley, whose occultist
interests and graveyard pursuits may also have inspired Mary
Shelley with the model for Victor: at one stage in the narrative
he is accused by his tutor, Professor Kempe, of exchanging 'the
discoveries of recent enquirers for the dreams of forgotten
alchemists' such as Paracelsus and Agrippa.

I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the
philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. But the latter
obtained my most undivided attention: wealth was an inferior
object, but what glory would be attained by the discovery, if I
could banish disease from the human frame, and render man
invulnerable to any but a violent death! (35)3

Critics who identified the author as a disciple of Godwin
included Walter Scott, who noted that
Frankenstein, with its emphasis upon the pursuit of the
philosopher's stone, is a novel written on similar lines to
St Leon.

Apart from the variations on a Rosicrucian theme represented by
the monster, three further examples should suffice to draw
attention to those aspects of Mary Shelley's fiction which may
be related to the tradition of the Rosy Cross: the visual
imprint of Fuseli, the connection of the Rosicrucian Johann Konrad Dippel with
Castle Frankenstein, and finally the influence of Erasmus Darwin's botanical
poetry.

Adding to the already lengthy list of sources for the novel, it
is possible that Mary Shelley may have been inspired with the
idea for the monster after seeing Fuseli's painting The
Rosicrucian Cavern (1803), which depicts a
mechanical being defending from intruders the tomb of Christian
Rosencreutz, the legendary founder of the Brotherhood of the
Rosy Cross. Peter Tomary, in his critical biography of Fuseli,
suggests that Mary may have seen this painting at an exhibition
held at the Royal Academy in 1804. It illustrated an essay by
Eustace Budgell which had appeared in The Spectator,
describing how a mechanical statue primed to attack intruders
while {64} guarding the tomb of Rosencreutz turns out to be no
more than a piece of vicious clockwork.4 In retrospect, this automaton may
also be seen as a distant relative of the clunking, bolted
cinematic version of the monster. Percy Shelley's enthusiasm for
the current vogue for automata may have galvanised Mary
Shelley's imagination.

Even the title of the novel could be argued as having a
Rosicrucian resonance, if we accept that it was named after
Castle Frankenstein, allegedly the home of the alchemist, Johann Konrad Dippel.5 The tentative
connection between Dippel and the Frankenstein legend, while
awaiting conclusive historiographical confirmation, serves to
enhance the mystique of the novel. Parallels between Victor and
the eighteenth-century alchemist Dippel are much in evidence:
both were drawn to the quest for the philosopher's stone and the
elixir of life. More compelling still, Dippel even used to sign
his name 'Frankenstein' and, again in common with Victor, one of
his alleged hobbies was to plunder graves for the
purposes of furthering his experiments in the artificial
creation of life; an activity which in the eyes of the
authorities hardly compensated for the blasphemy of exhuming the
dead. Dippel, undeterred, did not separate his necromantic
experiments from his researches into the elixir of life, which
had led him to suppose that blood as opposed to other vital body
fluids held the life-giving property he sought. His distillation
of blood and bones, liquidized and conducted through iron tubes,
conjures up the crude mechanics of a scene from Victor's
laboratory. The end-product, known as Dippel's Oil, far from
being the panacea it was heralded as, served most effectively as
a nervous stimulant, doubtless guaranteed to expel the most
persistent opium dream. But this chemical compound was eclipsed
by yet another formula, this time for the elixir of life, which
Dippel offered to disclose to the local land-owner, the
Landgrave of Hesse, in exchange for Castle Frankenstein. In a
pamphlet of 1766, the Rosicrucian divulged that he had
discovered the secret of prolonging his own life to the age of
135 up to the year 1801. But unfortunately Dippel died a year
after making this claim!

The interplay between magic and science within a Rosicrucian
context crops up again, this time in connection with Erasmus Darwin. Attempting to
authenticate the foundations of her fiction, Mary Shelley calls
upon Darwin's scientific authority to confirm that re-animation
was not of 'impossible occurrence' (Frankenstein 6). In her
introduction to the novel, she describes a conversation
between Byron and Percy Shelley concerning
Darwin's experiments with {65} artificial life, which may have
triggered off her waking dream. A less well-known Darwinian
source for the monster may be found in the poem The Botanic
Garden (1791),
containing as it does a vivid description of the creation of a
monstrous being 'castled in ice' (187) which puts us in mind of
the Frankenstein monster cast out on the Arctic wastes. In
The Botanic Garden, the first faltering steps of Mary
Shelley's creature would seem to be almost anticipated:

IMMORTAL LIFE, her hand extending, courts
The lingering form, his tottering step supports
Leads on to Pluto's realms the dreary way
And gives him trembling to Elysian day. (88)

Like Frankenstein's monster, Darwin's creature inspires terror
in all who see it:

His mass enormous to the affrighted South;
Spreads o'er the shuddering line his shadowy limbs,
And frost and famine follow as he swims. (188)

Eventually the being is redeemed, soothed by sylphs and hailed
by nations as the 'MONARCH OF THE AIR':

In The Botanic Garden, Darwin combines magic and science
by exploring his interest in the artificial production of life
through the allegory and myth of the Rosicrucian tradition. In
his other botanic poem, Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic
Life (1794-6),
Darwin had noted that environmental conditions could mould
monstrosities. Possibly as a response to this, Shelley shows how
environment rather than heredity was responsible for poisoning
the mental, spiritual and psychic faculties of the Frankenstein
monster. Darwin's theory of generation, founded on the belief
that gender and other genetic inheritances were determined by
the mind of the male parent, may also have had significance in
relation to the Frankenstein creation.

{66} Victor Frankenstein is the architect of an immortality
independent of women which effectively usurps the female
reproductive role. The Frankenstein monster, though
literally of woman born, is a dire warning of the dangers of
solitary paternal propagation. As a grim parable of Lockean empiricism, the monster
is fed on a diet of primarily patriarchal sense-impressions.
Maternal deprivation accelerates mental and physical
degeneration, moral and spiritual decline. Mary Shelley debunks
the masculine myth that woman was born of man by portraying the
offspring of a male mother as a monster. Frankenstein's
Luciferian folly of pride and failure of the imagination is
posited on the belief that men, basking in the illusion of the
dispassionate objectivity of so-called scientific rationality
rather than relying on the workings of nature, can produce a
higher form of life than that brought about by sexual
reproduction and nurturing by the female. Although professing to
shy away from polemic, Mary Shelley challenges the historically
pervasive and culturally validated identification of rational
science with masculinity which marginalises instinctual Nature
and femininity. Her own procreation of fictional monstrosities,
amplifying the monstrous consequences of male narcissism, shows
the scientist not only perilously denying the value of domestic
relations -- a matter which had preoccupied Godwin in St
Leon -- but also striving to subjugate nature. Anne Mellor
develops this argument by showing how Mary Shelley deploys a
feminist critique of science predicated on the way in which
scientific developments sometimes employed metaphor and
imagery. Virile male science pitted against a passive and
subdued nature for the purposes of violation and penetration was
a predominant image of the Scientific Revolution. This is the
imperative uttered in Frankenstein when Professor Waldman urges
the young Victor to adhere to the model of scientists who
penetrate into the recesses of nature and expose how she works
in her hiding places. Mellor cites Bacon's famous injunction: 'I am
come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children
to bind her to your service and make her your slave.'6 Regarded
generally as the father of the 'scientific method', Bacon does
not here explicate his role merely in the prose of paternity but
instead resorts to the highly-charged language of the slave
trader.

As a system advocating synthesis, the Rosicrucian tradition may
have attracted Mary Shelley as an ideological alternative to
this bifurcation of magic and science, and this binary
opposition between the male and the female principles. This may
be illustrated by the {67} central symbolism of Rosicrucianism,
the rose on the cross, which is a representation of the unity of
the male and female compounding the name of the legendary
founder, Christian Rosencreutz. Yet the androgyny of this system
of symbolism grounded in the iconography of alchemy may be
suspect to present-day thinking, since androgynous compromises
invariably end up privileging the male, and as such do not offer
a satisfactory alternative to the gendering of male science and
female nature.7 The literary tradition of the Rosy
Cross enabled Mary Shelley to proclaim the importance of the
domestic affections as espoused by her parents, as well as to
explore the theme of mortal immortality -- an enduring concern
of her work. The spiritual odyssey of the Rosicrucian wanderer
had perilously overloaded existing Gothic structures; hence its
shift towards the more flexible parameters of Romanticism. Mary
Shelley's fiction effectively freed the Rosicrucian
preoccupation with immortality from Godwin's Enlightenment
materialism and Percy Shelley's Germanic melodrama, thus
enabling it to take its rightful place within the Romantic
imagination.

Notes

symbolically, the transformation of lead into gold
betokens the transmutation of the alchemist from a physical to a
presumably eternal spiritual state. To a degree, then,
Frankenstein is posing a false dichotomy. No less than
the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone promises
immortality. The effect is to blur the equation between
immortality and transcendence. (83)

7. Androgyny has been discredited by, for
example, Harris and Secor. See also Veeder.

Works Cited

Birkhead, Edith, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic
Romance (London: Constable, 1921).

Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson,
1789-91).

De Quincey, Thomas, The Collected Works of Thomas de
Quincey, ed. David Masson, 6 vols (Edinburgh: A. and C.
Black, 1880).

Florescu, Radu, In Search of Frankenstein (London: New
English Library, 1975).

Godwin, William, Lives of the Necromancers or, an account of
the most eminent persons in successive ages, who have acclaimed
for themselves, or to whom has been imputed by others, the
exercise of magical powers (London: Frederick J. Mason,
1834).